Dear Wendy

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2005

Dear Wendy
Thomas Vinterberg
DENMARK/GERMANY/UNITED KINGDOM/FRANCE, 2005
English 101 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Lucky Punch I/S/ Nimbus Zentropa Production
Executive Producer: Peter Garde, Peter Aalbzek Jensen, Bo Ehrhardt, Birgitte Hald
Producer: Sisse Graum Jorgensen
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Cinematographer: Anthony Dod Mantle
Editor: Mikkel E.G. Nielsen
Production Designer: Karl Juliusson
Sound: Kristian Eidnes Andersen
Music: Benjamin Wallfisch
Principal Cast: Jamie Bell, Bill Pullman, Michael Angarano, Danso Gordon
Production: Lucky Punch I/S

Dear Wendy showcases writer Lars von Trier and director Thomas Vinterberg’s tremendous talents to great effect. Von Trier reduces the snarling fury of Dogville, his wide-ranging critique of American frontier values, into a single-minded autopsy of gun adoration. His virtuosic script winks accusingly at pop culture’s obsession with weaponry and pokes fun at its phallic roots. The firearms culture south of the border is perhaps America’s most baffling and self-damning inheritance; its internal illogic offers fertile ground for von Trier’s hatred of bourgeois mythmaking.

Vinterberg’s direction brings warmth to von Trier’s relentless intellectual attack. He loves the form and construction of cinema and skilfully finesses the film’s slides in and out of cinematic reference. He is also an exceptional director of actors, giving his performers much more space (both literal and emotional) than von Trier has done in his recent work, allowing us to invest ourselves in these rich characters.

Jamie Bell seizes this opportunity with both hands. Following his haunting performance in David Gordon Green’s Undertow, Dear Wendy confirms Bell’s ability to enter the ambiguous world of a boy on the crest of adulthood. His mesmerizing, courageous performance adds volumes of pathos to the film’s argument.

Set in a whimsically stylized archetypal mining town, the film observes Bell’s character, Dick, a loner coddled by his family’s African-American maid, Clarabelle (Novella Nelson), as he falls in love with a gun he names Wendy. Dick draws a motley crew into a secret society called the Dandies, who dress up in funny hats, shoot at targets and watch films about the damage bullets do to flesh. When Dick is charged by the town’s sheriff (Bill Pullman) with serving as a kind of probation officer for Clarabelle’s grandson, a teenaged murderer named Sebastian (Danso Gordon), the gang is disrupted in unexpected ways.

The film has been attacked by American critics as didactic and narratively incomplete. These charges, also levelled at von Trier’s Dogville, are particularly absurd here as layers of historical argument envelop the viewer in the nightmarish love affair with guns that endlessly proclaims itself on the nightly news. This is satire at its most powerful.
—Noah Cowan